Low voter turnout, voter suppression and a whopping number of White women voters supporting Donald Trump led to a historic political upset.

As the nation continues to dissect the polling data that led to Donald Trump‘s election, we can’t ignore the impact of voter suppression and the high number of White women voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump.

Republican-led voter suppression efforts may have kept just enough voters from casting their ballots to ensure the election remained extremely close around the nation.

On Thursday’s edition of NewsOne Now,Roland Martin and his panel of guests discussed the effect of voter suppression and how 53 percent of White women who voted for Donald Trump helped the Republican presidential nominee become President-elect of the United States.

Martin explained Trump amassed fewer votes than any Republican candidate in 16 years on his way to the White House. According to the host of NewsOne Now, 59.2 million people voted for Trump, 60.9 million voted for Mitt Romney, 60 million voted for John McCain, and 62 million voted for George W. Bush.

“There is no doubt that voter suppression played a critical role in the election of Donald Trump,” said Martin. “This was by design for the GOP for the last six years.”

In Wisconsin, for example, Trump won by 27,000 votes; there were 300,000 individuals in the state who lacked the proper voter ID. This extremely high number of Wisconsinites impacted by the state’s voter ID legislation not only included African-Americans, but also included older White voters.

“Elderly White voters had to go to the DMV two and three times just to get their voter ID,” said Martin.

Lauren Victoria Burke responded to Martin’s assessment of the 2016 election, saying voter suppression “definitely played a critical role, but I don’t know that it played a role to 9 million votes.”

According to the NewsOne Now panelist, Clinton received nine million fewer votes than Pres. Barack Obama did in 2008.

Burke added, “When you have two candidates that have very high negatives that people do not like – and Hillary Clinton had huge negatives and no message – of course some of that is going to voter suppression, but a lot of that is the candidate from the 1990s that you (the Democratic Party) nominated, that couldn’t even beat an outsider, a no-name Senator from Illinois in 2008.

“The Democratic Party should have some sense of that. You can’t run somebody from the past.”

Another very interesting factor concerns the White women’s vote. The New York Timesreported a whopping 53 percent of White female voters supported Trump on Election Day, despite his sexist and degrading comments about them.

NewsOne Now panelist Monique Pressley, Principal of The Pressley Firm, PLLC, said Trump “became the messenger of hate, of racism, of sexism, and we can’t blame all White women” for the outcome of the election.

She opined White women ages 18–24, “mind being sexually assaulted, they mind being treated like a sexist, they mind being disenfranchised by what he (Donald Trump) was doing.

“It was their mothers who don’t mind it – That’s who voted,” she continued. “It was the women who did not vote for McCain who were older than that age group (18–24) who did not vote for Romney [who] voted for this man.

“This is the housewife who doesn’t mind being talked to that way because that’s the way her husband has been talking to her for the last 25 years anyway – that woman voted for this man,” said Pressley.

Watch Roland Martin and the NewsOne Now panel discuss the 2016 election results in the video clip above.